Cached file read performance

[Mark Kirkwood]

David Xu wrote:
> Mark Kirkwood wrote:
>> I recently did some testing on the performance of cached reads using 
>> two (almost identical) systems, one running FreeBSD 6.2PRE and the 
>> other running Gentoo Linux - the latter acting as a control. I 
>> initially started a thread of the same name on -stable, but it was 
>> suggested I submit a mail here.
>>
>> My background for wanting to examine this is that I work with 
>> developing database software (postgres internals related) and cached 
>> read performance is pretty important - since we typically try hard to 
>> encourage cached access whenever possible.
>>
>> Anyway on to the results: I used the attached program to read a cached 
>> 781MB file sequentially and randomly with a specified block size (see 
>> below). The conclusion I came to was that our (i.e FreeBSD) cached 
>> read performance (particularly for smaller block sizes) could perhaps 
>> be improved... now I'm happy to help in any way - the machine I've got 
>> running STABLE can be upgraded to CURRENT in order to try out patches 
>> (or in fact to see if CURRENT is faster at this already!)...
>>
>> Best wishes
>>
>> Mark
>>
> 
> I suspect in such a test, memory copying speed will be a key factor,
> I don't have number to back up my idea, but I think Linux has lots
> of tweaks, such as using MMX instruction to copy data.
> 
> Regards,
> David Xu
> 

David - very interesting - checking 2.6.18 sources I see:

arch/i386/lib/memcpy.c:7->

void *memcpy(void *to, const void *from, size_t n)
{
#ifdef CONFIG_X86_USE_3DNOW
     return __memcpy3d(to, from, n);
#else
     return __memcpy(to, from, n);
#endif
}


If I understand this correctly, I need CONFIG_X86_USE_3DNOW (or perhaps 
CONFIG_M586MMX) set in my Linux kernel config to be using these.... 
which I don't appear to have (I'll do some more digging and see if maybe 
profiling tells us anything useful).

Cheers

Mark